


The Light in the Window (of the house I grew up in)

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: True Love or Something [31]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Family Feels, Fluff, Gen, Mother's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 01:09:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10911213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: And they’re a symphony in this moment, and Mom is their conductor, effortlessly pulling them all together with a well-placed word or smile or reprimand or silly face or far-fetched story and Lance is very young so of course his world is small but in this half-remembered moment the kitchen feels like the whole world to him.They all have moms.





	The Light in the Window (of the house I grew up in)

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU EVERYONE, as usual, you are all awesome and excellent and your support means the world to me.
> 
> Taking a brief break from the Keith's dad angst-fest to write a short little mother's day fic featuring snapshots of the gang's relationships with their mothers (except for Coran, I went to write something for him, but his backstory got suuuuper convoluted so that's a story from another time and place)
> 
> This is structured a lot like 'Love is a Polaroid' (an earlier fic in this series) with each section as a one-sentence mini-fic.
> 
> Worry not, I'll be back to the 'When the Fight is All We Know' as soon as inspiration and time permit.

**The Light in the Window (of the house I grew up in)**

**Lance**

            One of Lance’s earliest memories is his Mom and the thing is, they’re not doing anything exciting or earth-shattering or adventurous, and maybe this isn’t a memory at all, it’s a composite of months, years worth of remembered half-seconds, fragments of the past swirling together into one butter-yellow afternoon in a cramped kitchen with creaking cabinets and too-tall counters, where little Lance stands on a wobbly chair to stir something in a bowl while his Mom hums at the stove and Val fusses with arranging something just right in a pan and Jamie sings some cartoon theme song while Carly, only a baby, makes a mess out of her crayons and finger paints on a piece of paper on the floor – and they’re a symphony in this moment, and Mom is their conductor, effortlessly pulling them all together with a well-placed word or smile or reprimand or silly face or far-fetched story and Lance is very young so of course his world is small but in this half-remembered moment the kitchen feels like the whole world to him.

 

**Matt**

            Matt is nineteen and stranded at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere, with only two quarters to make a call on a miraculously-still functioning payphone, but his Mom picks up on the first ring and she’s somehow there in less than half an hour, her baby blue van a jarring throwback to suburbia and warm summer days where the most painful thing in the world is falling off a bike and scraping your knees, she’s there without questions and she’s there without answers, pulling up easily and rolling down the driver’s window with a simple “Need a ride, honey?” and he hops in and she listens to him as he wobbles through his story of the night’s misadventures and she drives him home and listens as the words come tumbling out in messy, tangled heaps to lie on the floor between them.

 

**Shiro**

            “What do you want from me?” Shiro once demanded of his mother in a fit of teenage frustration and she’d tipped her head to the side, considering in that quiet, catlike way of hers and said, “I want you to have everything I couldn’t” even as he scoffed and walked away, but now she’s here and he’s here, after the army, after the explosion, after everything, her in a hospital room, him in a hospital bed, sharing space and feeling the years and miles between them as she reaches out and takes his uninjured hand and squeezes as she says “I’m here, Takashi, I’m here.”

 

**Allura**

            Allura is halfway to certain her mother taught her how to read and definitely, positively certain that her mother taught her how to play football – or soccer, whatever people want to call it – because Allura remembers being very small and running around a field that couldn’t have been that big, couldn’t have been as big as she remembers it being, kicking a ball with more enthusiasm than skill as a tall, lovely woman with a half-remembered face claps her hands and cheers somewhere above her head and she remembers the smell of grass mingling with the ghost of her mother’s perfume and the sports-shop smell of the ball and their jerseys and she can never imitate that scent, can’t bottle it, can’t bring it back now that her mother is long gone, but she remembers it and she can almost smell it as she kickes another goal.

 

**Hunk**

            Hunk’s mother taught him about machines, engines, systems – she taught him how to pull them apart and more importantly, how to put them back together again as they sat on the floor of the kitchen, coaxing life back into the stove, as they bent over the innards of yet another car in the garage, as they dragged a few more years of life out of a microwave, as they cobbled together a toaster oven, as she showed him how life works, how people work, how just like with machines, if you wait and watch you’ll see the big picture, you’ll find the problem, the little thing that’s been sitting with you wrong and you can have a chance to make it right.

 

**Keith**

            Keith’s mother knew all the stories behind all the constellations, and if she didn’t, she made some up so she’d have something to talk about, to fill the air when the desert night got too quiet and still and their blood was humming too fast and loud in their veins to allow for sleep – she’d take that time and trace lines in the sky that only they could see – “You know,” she’d say, “People in these stories always end up in the stars if they do something worth remembering, good or bad; you know – stars are for remembering,” and Keith, years later, will look up at the night sky and sometimes the stars will almost seem to align in his favor and he can find the barest trace of his mother, Diana, the Hunter, immortalized in the sky.

 

**Pidge**

            Pidge’s mom doesn’t shop, she buys; she moves through stores like a missle on a mission and Pidge likes to follow behind in her wake, feeding on that energy and throwing it back at her, like a reflection or a feedback loop and it doesn’t matter where they’re going or what they’re there to buy, computer parts and books, clothes and food, toaster ovens and toaster strudels, medical equipment and software – anything and everything – they’re _doing_ something, they’re being active and vibrant and focused _together,_ they’re twin missiles slicing through the world, they’re travelers soaking up every fiber and vibration of the universe and Pidge doesn’t think there’s anything that can stop them, not really.

 

**Lance**

            His Mama is his road-trip parent; if he had to choose one blood relative to spend hours upon hours trapped in a car on an endless highway with, it would be her and it would be _fun_ and they would sing and talk and sometimes just _be_ and some part of him wouldn’t want it to end because he can tell her anything and he always feels like there’s more he could say to her, more he can share, more he needs her input or opinion on, more stories he wants to tell her for the millionth time as she does the same, with her there is always more.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Mother Like Mine' by the Band Perry


End file.
